MMK Atakaş declared Deal of the Year

Trade Finance Magazine declared the agreement on financing the construction of MMK Atakaş the Deal of the Year. Trade Finance Magazine is a specialized edition belonging to Euromoney Institutional Investor Group.

‘Despite all the problems in the commodity markets and particularly the ferrous sector through 2009, Russian company OJSC MMK put together a ground-breaking deal to secure financing for the MMK Atakas flat steel making plant in Turkey. The transaction is a worthy winner of a Trade Finance magazine Deal of the Year award for 2009,’ says the magazine’s editor Jonathan Bell.

MMK Atakaş A. Ş. is a Russian-Turkish joint venture, with MMK owning 50% plus one share and Atakaş Group owning the rest. It was set up to design, construct, and operate an integrated metallurgical complex located in Iskenderun (South of Turkey) and Kocaeli (West of Turkey).

The construction process of MMK Atakaş A. Ş. began in October 2007; the project will probably have been completed by the end of 2010. The implementation of the project is three-staged. First, a maintenance center was launched in Iskenderun at the end of 2008. Next, the high-level processing facilities are to be launched. Finally, the electric furnace melting and casting shop will start operating.

Experts believe the competitive advantage of this complex with the capacity of 2.3 million tons of flat stock a year is the location: the premises are based on Turkey and the Middle East’s booming markets.

Now MMK’s successful cooperation with the world’s largest financial organizations has already won some recognition, the company’s PR Department says. For one, the MMK Atakaş agreement was declared Deal of the Year by Project Finance magazine in February 2010. Also, Trade Finance called the agreement on financing the Mill 2000 the Deal of the Year in 2009. Finally, MMK and a consortium of international banks (ABN AMRO Bank N.V. and ING Bank N.V) signed a deal on ?416.5m, ten-year loan (insured by the German EULER HERMES Kreditversicherungs-AG) on December 29, 2008.

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